easy souls, trouble little about the private morals of their lodgers, so long as no positive disorder comes about and no public scandal is occasioned.  A girl who says that she is occupied in a workroom is never presumed to be able to afford the luxury of strict virtue, and if such a one, on taking a room, says that “she supposes she may have friends come to see her?” the landlady will understand quite well what is meant, and will either accept or refuse her for a lodger as she sees good.  To such houses as these Lotty confined herself.  After some three or four years of various experiences, she hit upon the abode in Milton Street, and there had dwelt ever since.  She got on well with Mrs. Ledward, and had been able to make comfortable arrangements for Ida.  The other lodgers in the house were generally very quiet and orderly people, and she herself was quite successful in arranging her affairs so as to create no disturbance.  She had her regular elientele; she frequented the roads about Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill; and she supported herself and her child.

Ida Starr’s bringing up was in no respect inferior to that she would have received in the home of the average London artisan or small tradesman.  At five years old she had begun to go to school; Mrs. Ledward’s daughter, a girl of seventeen, took her backwards and forwards every day.  At this school she remained three years and a half; then her mother took her away, and put her under the care of Miss Rutherford, a better teacher.  When at home, she either amused herself in Lotty’s room, or, when that was engaged, made herself comfortable with Mrs. Ledward’s family, with one or other of whom she generally passed the night.  She heard no bad language, saw nothing improper, listened to no worse conversation than any of the other children at Miss Rutherford’s.  Even at her present age of ten it never occurred to her to inquire how her mother supported herself.  The charges brought by Harriet Smales conveyed to her mind no conception of their true meaning; they were to her mere general calumnies of vague application.  Her mother “bad,” indeed!  If so, then what was the meaning of goodness?  For poor Lotty’s devotion to the child had received its due reward herein, that she was loved as purely and intensely as any most virtuous parent could hope to be; so little regard has nature for social codes, so utterly is she often opposed to all the precepts of respectability.  This phrase of Harriet’s was the very first breathing against her mother’s character that Ida had ever heard.  Lotty had invented fables, for the child’s amusement, about her own earlier days.  The legend was, that her husband had died about a year after marriage.  Of course Ida implicitly believed all this.  Her mind contained pictures of a beautiful little house just outside London in which her mother had once lived, and her imagination busied itself with the time when they would both live in just that same way.  She was